DisCerning Eye: Gardens of Stones
By Mark Jenkins
June 11, 2026
TO MARK THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF ITS “FRAME AND FREQUENCY” video-art surveys, VisArts has mounted two exhibitions. The five-artist “Frame and Frequency X” is smaller and themeless, while the six-contributor “Liquid Territories” is larger and, however loosely, themed. Both showcase mostly video, but sometimes in association with other art forms.
Thus Dawn Whitmore’s “There and back again,” part of the smaller show, nestles two videos among paintings, one of them a large canvas whose representational images are montaged in a cinematic manner. Nearby, Jessye McDowell uses futuristic game-generation software to offer a parody of marketing for a futuristic AI companion; the video makes such products seem as banal as they ominous. The other entries include Liz Trosper’s animated eco-disaster tour, which depicts a burning tree and an ocean full of trash; and João Krefer’s intentionally disorienting short video of metropolitan Tokyo, composed of literal tracking shots — shot from a train — that are split horizontally with the lower set of images presented upside down.
“Liquid Territories” is more sweeping, as exemplified by its centerpiece, Felipe Castelblanco’s “Driftless.” Made over six years, the three-screen video observes a single person who navigates a primitive raft — also on display — through such diverse locations as an inlet overlooked by snowy peaks and a tight Venetian canal. If the bulk of the video appears mythic and timeless, the final sequence is specific and gently comic: It consists of TV footage of a scramble to arrest the artist as he paddles through a medium-sized American city.
Kissel Hiram Bravo Hernández’s mixed-format “Fire Warning” is a vision of an atrophying world, with forests on fire and buildings rotting like overripe vegetables, all depicted with a viewpoint in constant flux. Dwayne LeBlanc’s “You Don’t Exist” ponders migration and mixed identities with voiceover narration atop soft black-and-white imagery of clouds and an airplane in flight. Leigh Davis nestles a video of everyday female-coded activities — vacuuming, applying makeup — inside an installation that arrays green benches and a red telephone, evoking some sort of waiting room.
Local artist Jonathan Monaghan places two video screens within digital prints of elaborate frames for another of his elegant mashups of myth and reality, history and contemporary consumer culture. The looped short videos were inspired by the fable of Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humans and was punished by having his liver perpetually eaten by an eagle. In Monaghan’s twofold retelling, one figure is chained to a computer server rack and Prometheus’s vulnerability is expressed by a lineup of Naked juices. Myth, like history, repeats itself — the first time as tragedy, the second time as a marketing opportunity.
Frame & Frequency X | Common Ground Gallery | May 22-June 14
Frame & Frequency: Liquid Territories | Kaplan Gallery | May 29-July 12
